Chin, Alberta/Purchase, New York (Rural Roots Canada) – Alberta’s Perry Family Farm has been named the winner of the 2025 Farmer of the Year award at PepsiCo’s first-ever Global Farmer Awards. The Perry Family Farm was recognized for its leadership in regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, and sustainable food production.
Chris and Harold Perry, fourth-generation potato growers from southern Alberta, were selected from more than 300,000 farms worldwide. The Perry family has supplied potatoes to PepsiCo’s Lay’s brand potato chips for over 45 years.
“It’s just an incredible honour for the farm,” says Chris. “We have a whole team of people. We call it the Perry Family Farm, but it’s also the Perry Farm family with all the people involved and their families and what we do.”
Harold says the recognition reflected not only their innovation but also shared values with PepsiCo.
“It was an honour to receive this award, and it’s very nice that PepsiCo and us are aligned to the same values because the culture that we built,” he explains. “We’re very happy with the direction that we’re going and where our team is, and for Pepsi to recognize us with this award and have the exact same alignment is just fantastic.”
For the brothers, the honour came as a surprise.
“It came a little bit out of the blue,” says Chris. “It was the inaugural Growers’ awards that they decided to hold. The timing was good because we came off a really nice year. We won the Frito-Lay Grower of North America Award, so that put us in the running, but we didn’t really expect it. We didn’t know it was coming. When we got there, we learned a lot more. It was like, holy smokes. They really invested in what that was. It was wonderful to see.”
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The brothers have a 45-year partnership with PepsiCo and say the company’s recent focus on celebrating farmers has been meaningful.
“That actually is huge for us because we grow for McCain’s, and we grow for Pepsi as well,” says Harold. “When they emphasize the partnership that the growers are super involved in producing this end product, we see great things out of the company. PepsiCo has put a lot of emphasis on the farmers…and that’s fantastic.”
PepsiCo said the awards are part of its pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) initiative, a global strategy to embed sustainability across its operations, including a commitment to drive regenerative agriculture on 10 million acres by 2030.
“Our business starts with farmers. They are the heartbeat of our supply chain and the foundation of the global food system,” said Ramon Laguarta, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo., in a release. “These awards are about celebrating their contributions, highlighting the innovations they’re pioneering and reinforcing our shared ambition to help build a more resilient, more sustainable, more inclusive agricultural system.”
The brother credit much of their success to progressive practices like soil biology research and renewable energy innovation.
“It basically goes from keeping living plants on the soil as long as you can, getting the photosynthetic energy from the sun, exuding that into the soil, getting the massive diversity that goes on down there to balance everything out and suppress disease and get the best crops that you can,” explains Harold. “If our soil is healthy and the biology is balanced in the soil, we don’t have to do anything. The plant knows what to do.”
The farm’s anaerobic digester, one of only a few dozen in Canada, converts organic waste into renewable energy, creating what the Perrys call a “circular economy” model.
“It’s an organic waste-to-energy system. We pull the methane off to make energy. The digestate comes out, which goes back to the land,” says Chris. “It fits so well into regenerative agriculture and the energy balance. Putting that all together, it’s been a great project on the farm that just fits into everything we’re doing.”
He adds, “We try a lot of progressive stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s attempting to implement best practices in what we do. So part of that, I think, is being recognized through an award like this.”
In addition to their sustainability practices, the Perrys have become the faces of PepsiCo’s Real Food from Real Farms campaign, appearing in national commercials filmed on their farm near Chin, Alberta.
